


Home

by MalenkayaCherepakha



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-09 00:56:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17397056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MalenkayaCherepakha/pseuds/MalenkayaCherepakha
Summary: A story about the importance of home, and the different forms it can take.





	Home

Harry has always spent a lot of time thinking about home.

It was inevitable really, that an orphan who was never loved as a child should spend so much time wondering what home means, and what makes a house a home rather than just a building. More than anything though, Harry would wonder when and how he would finally find a home for himself.

 

* * *

 

 

As a small child, locked in his cupboard by relatives who were supposed to care for him but instead abused him, he would spend hours watching the spiders spin their webs above his head, creating elaborate fantasies that all ended with him finding his real home.

In some of these stories, his parents turned out not to have died at all. One day, there would be a knock at the door out of the blue, and once opened it would reveal his parents, full of joy at having found him.

Sometimes he had been kidnapped by an evil criminal and his scheming wife as part of an elaborate plot to get money from his parents.

Sometimes he imagined that his parents had left him with his aunt and uncle just for a few weeks while they were on holiday, only for them to be captured by pirates during their cruise, stopping then from coming back to get him. Harry would lie there for hours, envisaging the daredevil stunts and ingenious plans his parents would come up with to escape from the pirates, picturing the long journey back to Privet Drive from the pirate fortress on an island in the middle of the ocean. In these scenarios his parents would always survive the journey despite the obstacles they faced, proving how much they loved him by facing down terrifying pirates just to be able to see him again.

Whatever reason there may have been for him being alone at Privet Drive for so long, once his parents found him they always took him back with them. Sometimes there would be a dramatic showdown, his father duelling Uncle Vernon using the skills that helped him defeat the pirates. Other times they would quietly break into the house at night, telling Harry to be as quiet as a mouse while they sneaked him out without the Dursleys hearing.

He would always be taken back to a beautiful cottage, a place that felt full of love and happiness. The exact details varied as he got older; the toys he found waiting in his room changed as he moved from cuddly toys to action figures, the wallpaper shifting as his favourite colour became blue rather than green, but the base of the fantasy always remained the same – a home where he was wanted.

 

Other times, particularly as he became older, his parents stayed dead even in his dreams. Instead, he would imagine the day he finally left Privet Drive as an adult.  

The house that became his home was rarely the same.

He lived in minimalistic penthouses in New York with incredible views and all the latest technology, and in small but cosy studio flats in the bohemian parts of Paris.

He spent weeks intricately plotting out all the details of his beach front house in the Caribbean, imagining the wide windows that would open up to let him walk directly from his bedroom on to the sand.

Occasionally his future house looked very similar to the house he had always pictured his parents taking him back to; a ramshackle cottage covered in ivy in a small village, with a huge farmhouse kitchen where he cooked what he wanted, not what Aunt Petunia demanded.

He sometimes lived with faceless strangers in large shared houses, creating detailed characters for them and picturing the way their daily lives would intersect, making him ache for true friends of his own.

More often he would end up sharing these various houses with just one other person, a hazy, indistinct figure who nonetheless became the focal point of those particular fantasies. The love that Harry felt from them as they went about their shared lives in their beloved house warmed his heart and made returning from his dreams into the real world of his cupboard agonising, the spiders who he usually considered friends instead just a reminder of how alone he was.

 

* * *

 

 

When Harry arrived at Hogwarts he thought he’d found it.

His parents may not have miraculously returned from the dead, but he did now have some semblance of family, of love, of warmth.

He had a real bed of his own in a cosy dorm room, teachers who (with the exception of Snape) seemed pleased to have him in their classes, and an owl he could always go and see when he needed comfort.

It wasn’t long until coming back to the Gryffindor common room at the end of each day felt exactly like he’d imagined returning home would, the squishy armchairs and roaring fire leaving him filled with a sense of belonging and happiness.

One thing made Hogwarts home more than any other.

In Ron and Hermione, Harry finally found the family he’d always wanted. Only once he had it did he realise how much he had been craving a real family, how lost and alone he had felt without it.

Thanks to Ron and Hermione, Harry no longer felt like an unloved orphan.

 

* * *

 

 

For a while the Burrow was a contender for the title of ‘home’.

The school holidays that Harry spent there quickly became some of the best times of his life, particularly as Hogwarts became more dangerous.

The Burrow had the same shabby but well-loved quality of the cottages his dream parents had snuck him off to, the same feeling of welcome and family. Molly and Arthur made Harry feel more at home on his first day at the Burrow than Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had in his 10 years at Privet Drive.

For several years, Harry thought he had cracked the code of what made a house home.

Home was Quidditch in the garden, teasing Percy for his dedication to his schoolwork and then his career, and laughing with the twins.

Home was Molly’s cooking, big family dinners full of shouting and joking and love disguised as bickering. It was platefuls of food placed in front of him, admonishments if they weren’t cleared, and frequent treacle tarts just because they were his favourite.

Home was the closest thing he had felt to a mother’s love; it was hugs every time he walked through the door, it was kisses on the forehead every time he left.

Home was the feeling of belonging to a family, of being just another brother, another son, of not being alone anymore.

 

* * *

 

 

There was a year where Harry once again had no home.

Instead he had a tent, and a horcrux that sucked the joy out of his very soul.

To begin with he had Ron and Hermione, and at least sometimes their presence could make the tent feel like a pale imitation of home.

But then there was just him and Hermione, and nothing could bring back the feeling he had experienced at Hogwarts and the Burrow.

And then there was Christmas Eve, when Harry finally saw the home he should have had. The fantasies he’d had as a child were correct in a lot of ways – the cottage looked a lot like he had imagined it would, old and rustic with gardens that had clearly once been beautiful. But there was no way Harry could have prepared for the sense of loss and grief that overcame him as he looked at the house he should have spent his childhood in.

The tent had been bad enough before, but now Harry could picture how his life should have been it became unbearable.

 

* * *

 

 

Once the war was over, Harry returned to the Burrow, hoping that the warmth and comfort of his adopted home would help him to heal from the pain caused by the destruction of Hogwarts.

The first months passed in a blur of numbness, Harry’s brain simply shutting down, unable to deal with the pain and suffering he’d witnessed, unable to cope with the constant reminders of it every time he saw Molly’s red eyes or heard George fail to finish a joke without his partner in crime.

Harry was no longer concerned with finding a home; the need to feel like he belonged became unimportant when he couldn’t comprehend ever being able to feel happiness again.

 

* * *

 

 

Inevitably the fog slowly began to lift, and Harry began to be able to feel hope for the future, despite the ever-present ache in his heart for all that he had lost.

The question of what to do next gradually became more pressing and, still unable to really think properly and sensibly, Harry found himself sleepwalking into the path that everyone expected him to follow.

Signing up to the aurors made sense – he didn’t want anyone else to experience what he had, and as the Saviour he had a responsibility to make sure everyone else was safe.

He moved into Grimmauld Place, at first with Ron and Hermione, before being joined by Dean and Seamus, and then Luna. They formed a bunch of misfits trying to navigate their way through the trauma and grief they were all affected by, providing each other with the support they needed to get through each day. It was a twisted, unhappy version of the shared house Harry had sometimes dreamed about, and he relished having others around to distract him from the nightmares that still plagued him.

 

It couldn’t last though, and soon all his friends began to talk about moving out, ready to start their adult lives in their respective couples. Harry did his best to convince them that he would be fine without them, that he was settled in Grimmauld now and it would be good to have his own space after so long.

But without the noise of people constantly coming and going, without friends to chat to over a cup of tea until he was exhausted enough to fall into a dreamless sleep, and especially without Ron and Hermione just down the hall, Grimmauld lost everything that had made Harry like living there.

Harry was starting to realise that home has nothing to do with the building or who might have left it to him; home was in fact the people who inhabited the house.

 

* * *

 

 

Harry ended up finding home somewhere he would never have imagined.

The townhouse he finally settled in wasn’t the cottage in the countryside that he had pictured as a child, and it wasn’t a glossy penthouse either.

It certainly wasn’t Grimmauld Place, the only similarity being that they were both London townhouses.

For one, it was significantly smaller, with a far more manageable number of rooms, and as far as he knew, no history of dark magic.

It was in fact a modest but attractive terrace, with a light and airy living room decorated in soothing shades of blue, with artwork by Luna adorning the walls. It had a small but beautifully tended garden, full of plants gifted to them by Neville. It had a large and well-appointed kitchen where Harry, who had rediscovered his love of cooking, frequently cooked large meals for all his friends which descended into chaos that was reminiscent of dinners at the Burrow.

The kitchen wasn’t just for large parties however. It was also where he ate rushed breakfasts before dashing off to his work at a charity for disadvantaged children, and where he made hot chocolate on nights when his nightmares still wouldn’t let him sleep.

It was the room where he danced and sung while cooking dinner, pulling out his most ridiculous dance moves to draw out Draco’s small smile that he reserved just for Harry. It was the room where they drank tea and talked about the minutiae of their days, where they occasionally made love, and most importantly the room where Harry had got down on one knee to ask the most terrifying question of his life.

 

* * *

 

 

As he got older, Harry thought about home less and less. It was no longer a thing to dream about, or try and imagine, or miss.

Home just was. He didn’t need to lie awake picturing it – he already had it.

Home was coming in from the cold after a long day at work to find the fire already burning. It was curling up on the sofa with a book and a glass of firewhisky, his feet tucked under a blanket on Draco’s lap. It was lounging in the garden on hot summer days, or watching the rain pour down the window panes while watching a film together.

It was having Ron and Hermione over for dinner, or listening as Pansy, Blaise and Draco shared exaggerated stories about what had gone on in the dungeons. It was having Teddy run riot through the house, dropping toys everywhere, while Harry, Draco, Narcissa and Andromeda tried to entertain him.

Home meant having someone who was always on his side, who would comfort him when he woke screaming from his nightmares, who he could talk to about his childhood and the scars that it had left.

Home was breakfast in bed on a Saturday morning. It was the feeling of pushing into Draco’s body while looking deep into his eyes and knowing that this was what the next 5, 10, 20 years of his life would be like. It was having a future he actively looked forward to and having someone to plan it with. Home was the comforting weight of the silver ring on his finger, the love and security he felt every time he looked at it.

 

After many years, Harry realised that he had finally figured it out.

Turns out, Draco was what made a house become a home.

 

 


End file.
